How to bootstrap your marketing –
for founders of early-stage B2B tech services companies

Let’s say you’re heading up an early-stage company (i.e. less than ~4-7 years old).

You’ve got the business off the ground. You’ve been doing solid work and you’ve got good customers. It appears that you may just make it. It’s been challenging and exhilarating.

The problem is you feel like you’ve hit a wall when it comes to finding new customers.

You’ve exhausted your network. Referrals are still coming your way, but not enough. You’ve been trying social media and other ways to attract attention, but you just can’t seem to find the sales leads/opportunities you need to keep this business sustainable.

What the heck do you do now?

Take a deep breath. Relax for a minute.

There likely isn’t a quick fix to your problem, but there are things you can do to start making progress.

Let’s start getting our head straight and prioritize where to spend your precious energy.

First let’s take those frustrating marketing methods you’ve been trying to teach yourself (e.g. social, SEO, paid ads) and put them aside for now so we can focus on bootstrapping your marketing for real, from the foundation up.

Here are some of the most important questions you’ll need to start answering for your company over time:

1. What real market problem(s) am I solving?
2. For whom?
3. How do I engage them?
4. What are my proof points?
5. How do I separate myself from the masses?

To start answering those questions, here are some tips for where to start:

1. Don’t get confused by the marketing that’s in your face.
2. Don’t get overwhelmed by the multitude of marketing methods out there.
3. Start thinking (more) about your business model.
4. Execute – you need proof points.
5. Do more for existing customers.
6. Start capturing feedback.
7. Start finding your niches.
8. Start capturing ideas about what you would write about.
9. Practice getting published.

Let’s go through each of these.

Don’t get confused by the marketing that’s in your face

You see it everywhere, from large companies, with ginormous marketing budgets.

Elaborate and captivating video ads, beautifully designed graphics, in-depth reports.

For the most part you can put that stuff out of your mind for now.

It’s not that what they’re trying to do is totally irrelevant for you in concept; it’s more that the way they go about it probably isn’t relevant for you at this stage. They could go through your yearly marketing budget in one ad.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the multitude of marketing methods out there

If you’re trying to figure out how to do marketing, no doubt you’ve come across an almost overwhelming number of methods to consider (e.g. tradeshows, direct mail, inbound, content, social, email, account-based engagement, search (organic / SEO & paid)).

When you’re just getting started you shouldn’t be thinking about all these methods.

It’s too much. It’ll break you.

Start with 1 primary and 2 secondary.

Which methods?

Well, that depends on several aspects specific to your scenario (e.g. the specifics of your market, the personality of your company, your current state, your desired goals).

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at this stage in the game to worry about marketing methods. However, since I know you want some sort of handle to grab on to, here are a couple tidbits:

1. There’s a very good chance you’re going to want to create content. See Content marketing for engineering companies.
2. You’re going to want to decide whether you want be more inbound-focused or outbound-focused, philosophically. See Inbound marketing vs outbound marketing.

Start thinking (more) about your business model

You want to start to get a sense of the longer-term viability of your business.

How do you add value? In other words, what are the real problems you’re solving for your customers, from their perspective, not from yours.

Are you in a mature marketplace? Do you need to re-position? Is your ocean getting redder? Can you make it bluer?

What’s your guesstimate of your median customer lifetime value (CLV)?

Does the work come in bursts? Can you smooth it out? Is it sticky?

What’s your repeat business rate?

What else can you do to help your customers after you’ve helped them with the first thing they needed help with?

Where does your company fall on the risk-reward spectrum?

Check out Assessing the health of a B2B services business for more.

Execute – you need proof points

You want to do a good job for your existing clients for multiple reasons. One reason is that you need “proof points”.

What do I mean by proof points?

Mainly:

1. Case studies
2. Metrics
3. Testimonials/quotes
4. Articles that teach your potential customers

You don’t need to limit to these, but they’re a good place to start.

You aren’t selling products. You sell things that don’t exist yet (services). You need proof points.

Do more for existing customers

Do you have existing customers? If not, then this article isn’t really for you.

If you do, are you really doing everything you can for them? Is there an unmet need that several of your customers have?

You need to actively and deliberately consider this, as you’ve already built trust with this group of people and they may help sustain you until you cross over to a point where you can attract new customers.

See How to sell to existing customers for more detail.

Start capturing feedback

You need to learn from the market.

Start capturing the most important pieces of feedback you receive:

1. The way customers describe their most significant problems
2. Where you add the most value to your customers
3. Concerns potential customers have during the sales process
4. Unmet needs that may translate to new service ideas
5. Things you do really well
6. Things you do poorly

Start finding your niches

The narrower you are, the more likely you are to be able to develop a differentiated position: distancing yourself from competition and living a happier existence.

That doesn’t mean you should have just one niche necessarily in the long run. You then run the risk of too many eggs in one basket. You can have multiple niches.

If you want me to guess, it’s more likely that you’re too broad as a business, as opposed to not broad enough.

See Why you need a niche.

Start capturing ideas about what you would write about

You need to start writing down ideas for what you would create content around.

I’m not saying start publishing a new article every week on your website or on LinkedIn. In fact, I’m not even suggesting that you publish these ideas (yet) at all.

These topics should be informed/influenced by:

1. the feedback you’re capturing
2. the niches you’re considering.

Start writing the topics down.

Practice getting published

You’ll want to start practicing conveying your thoughts to the world. Information needs to flow more freely and coherently from your head.

Help publications / media outlets by contributing your perspective on the topics that you know about and they want to publish.

I know what you’re thinking….

“I’ll just outsource my writing to someone else. I’ve got more important things to do.”.

Don’t do it.

You need practice. Or at least, an appropriate someone in your company needs to start doing this.

If you have someone outside your company do this for you, the insights will be lacking and it won’t be your voice that’s shining through. I’m not saying that you can’t have someone help you with this process, I’m just saying you can’t completely outsource it, or the quality will likely suffer significantly.

Next Steps

Start executing on these tips.

You’ve got a long journey ahead of you. There are no silver bullets, just a lot of hard work with a lot of pieces that need to align.

Feel free to reach out if you want someone to talk through some of the specifics with you or offer an opinion.